Learn About the Components of Homemade Synthesizer

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Lorin Parker with Expert Village, and we're creating what I think is the world's simplest oscillator. And really all you need for this oscillator, this square wave oscillator, are four components, battery, capacitor, resistor, and an integrated circuit, also known as a "chip" to create this oscillation. So let's take a look at these components. Right here we have the chip that's doing the majority of our work, and this is a 7414 chip. And you can tell the numbers that tell you what kind of chip it is are down here on the lower row and this one says 74HC14. Usually it's 74 followed by some letters, and then a number which is 14 in this case, and then sometimes there are some letters afterward. What really matters is that 7414, as long as you get those right, then you have the same kind of circuit. And when you look at a computer chip, or an integrated circuit like this, this is a very standardized integrated circuit, you have different pins. And these are going to be important hooking this up. And there's a little dimple right here and there's also a notch in the chip right there, you start where the dimple is and that's pin number 1, and then you count from left to right, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, you go over to the other side, 8, now you're counting from right to left, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14. So when we talk about how to hook this up, pin 1 is where the dimple is and it goes around like this, and around like this until you reach pin 14. So that's our chip, it's doing the amplification. Now in our feedback circuit, we have a resistor, and this is a simple resistor, it looks like it's a 220 ohm resistor, and most of your resistors look like this but also a potentiometer like I was using earlier is a type of resistor, it's just a variable type of resistor, you can control with a knob. This is our capacitor. It's a ceramic disc capacitor and the numbering on them shows you what the value is. This is 104, so it tells me that I have 1,0, so that's ten, and then the last number is how many zeros I have after that, so it's 10,000 pico farads. That's a good value to start out with. And right here I have my batteries, just simply two triple "A" batteries, that provide three volts, which is what this chip needs to operate. And those are the components for our simple oscillator.

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